Digital media device maker migrates to Linux

Interact-TV, a digital media management company based in Westminster, Colo., uses a custom Linux operating system built on Fedora Core as the base for its digital television servers. As a result of his experiences with Linux and other open source software on the production floor, CEO Ken Fuhrman has fired his Web host, fired up some Red Hat servers, and created a custom Web-based engineering environment along with StarOffice and Linux for administrative desktops.

Interact-TV produces Telly Home Entertainment Servers. The units comes with hard drives that are compartmentalized to store movies, photos, and music, plus optional CD-RW drives and Internet connections. The company provides a software developer’s kit that coders can use to create extensions and utilities for the Telly Servers.

Fuhrman sees several key benefits to using a Linux-based operating system. “Linux itself is very stable, it’s portable to a variety of different hardware platforms,” he says. “It is network-centric — the operating system is built around the ability to easily share content across networks.” Interact takes advantage of other open source software like NFS, Samba, and Apache.

Then there’s the overall reduction in development costs that Fuhrman claims comes from having a network of contractors and an enthusiastic community of open source software developers instead of having to hire a large in-house engineering team.

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